Today we spent the whole day sailing along the West Coast of the USA. The wind was blowing up to 40 knots full on the bow and the swell increased during the day, resulting in a lively ride. It is supposed to get better in the early hours of tomorrow morning when we move out… read more of “29 April 2008, at…”

San Diego is a port that every Holland America Line navigator knows even without ever having been there. Reason is that it is one of the standard ports that we get trained on during our Simulator courses. We call those BRM trainings, which stands for Bridge Resource Management. Every 5 years or less each navigator… read more of “28 April, 2008, San…”

Today we had a quiet sea day while on our way to San Diego where about 700 of our guests will be disembarking. We were sailing around 12 to 20 miles from the Mexican shore line and the weather remained good but the outside air temperature was slowly dropping. We are in full swing with… read more of “27 April 2008, at…”

With the whole deck department orchestra in tune, as mentioned yesterday, we managed to anchor the ship in a nice position by 7 am. and sent the first tender ashore to collect the authorities. By 8 am. we were up and running and the guests were streaming ashore. We were together with the Elation and… read more of “26 April 2008, Cabo…”

Finally after all these warm days we had a bit of a cool breeze. There was a moderate North Westerly breeze blowing caused by a disturbance off San Francisco. This brought cooler air from that area and thus the temperature dropped from the high 80’s to the mid seventies. For tomorrow in Cabo San Lucas… read more of “25 April 2008, At…”

Acapulco is still one of my favorite ports on the Pacific West coast. It is nice to sail in and out of; and the town is located right on top of the terminal so there is no fuss with shuttle busses and taxi’s to take to get somewhere. The only thing that can spoil the… read more of “24 April 2008,…”

Well the pilot in Puerto Chiapas was right; there were not the required weather conditions for a Tehantupecer and so we had a quiet and windless night again. I had hoped that he was right but as a precaution did advise the guests that we might list during the night in case one started blowing,… read more of “23 April 2008,…”

Today the ship and I, visited a new port; Puerto Chiapas, located close to Puerto Medan in the province of Chiapas. This is an attempt from the local Province to attract (cruise ship) tourists to this area and since last autumn cruise ships are starting to call here with greater frequency. The port is a… read more of “22 April, 2008…”